MIMIC THIS! When you get invited to events 3000 miles away (or 20 of them just across town), use COPY & PASTE with the really interesting events to seed your own community's plans for similar events. Why start from scratch.... Beg, borrow and mimic! More....

Purpose of the Group

I hope this can be a space where we can discuss Complex Adaptive Systems, Social Networks and their relationship to transition initiatives. I would love to explore resources and thinking about how to analyze and support the creation of Reslience in our network, and communities.

My starting point will be to share some resources I am reading and grappling with and to see where we go from there. I encourage folks to add resources and to share what questions they might want to explore here in the discussions I am starting below.

Here we go.....

Discussion Forum

Once you learn enough about healthcare it's inevitable that you look for the down stream cause of a lot of the problems. One is clearly at the government level. However, the government is likely to…Continue

As more people sign up here, I am wondering what would be the best use of the space? I have some questions based on my reading and thinking in the area:What do we mean by Community Resiliency?How do…Continue

I was presumptous without realizing it. Please forgive me. You are most certainly welcome here!

If you add a Discussion, complete with a title, a greater number/variety of people will readily find your valuable contributions, and a discussion may develop. When anyone merely posts to the Comment Wall (this area we're in), they seriously risk going un(der)-noticed. Best wishes, David

There is a book written by human consciousness researcher Daniel Goleman with regard to different types of intelligence that have proven to be far more important than I.Q. Goleman's first book was entitled: "Emotional Intelligence" and the second one is entitled: "Social Intelligence - The New Science of "Human Relationships." Since writing Social Intelligence, Goleman has gone on to write "Environmental Intelligence."

In Social Intelligence, Goleman concentrates on getting the message across as to how our daily contact with others -- how we use our energy -- shapes our brains and affect cells throughout our bodies -- down through the level of our genes.

What few of us are cognizant of is that our reactions to others, and theirs to ours , have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins -- and bad relationships like poisons. We catch other people's emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequences can be devastating.

After the warm welcome and encouragement to communicate by Bill Aal was received, i was very excited by the prospects of joining this group; however, very short cryptic remarks by others were a real turn off. While the request made may not have been without merit, the way it was delivered clearly said: "you are not welcome here."

It is my understanding that TransitionUS is about "building community" -- but IMHO if this is the way we are going about it we are not going to get very far. And, perhaps this is an indication as to why the "evolution of human consciousness" and an understanding of who we are at the quantum level -- the level of our cells -- is so very important today.

The challenges we face today demand that we move into another level of interacting that moves us into greater cooperation and love of our fellow human beings. This cannot be about efficiency without also being about effectiveness as well.

I am holding the field for the fullest potential to unfold in this event now in the best interests of all concerned.

When David C. Korten wrote the book: "The Post-Corporate World - Life After Capitalism," he did so after meeting biologist Mae Wan Ho on a plane flight and after seeing her work conceptualized a "spiritual awakening" based on creating an "organic" movement that more or less mimics the way the human body came into being as it organized itself in such a way as to be dynamic and evolving.

Now let me make a leap here to where i am today -- I am writing a book entitled: "The Sacred Quest for the Who of I Am." It is based in the biology of human consciousness, but i also digress over into what i call "the cultural baggage" which makes up most of our religious belief systems. And i got into this partly from reading Dr. Bruce H. Lipton's best-selling book: "The Biology of Belief - The Science of How Thoughts Control Life." Dr. Lipton is also the 2009 recipient of the GOI peace award for his work in the new field of "epigenetics." While it was once thought that our genes control who we are, "it is now recognized that the environment, and more specifically, our perception (our interpretation) of the environment, directly controls the activity of our genes. Environment controls gene activity through a process known as epigenetic control." Epigenetics meaning "above the genes. "This breakthrough in biology is fundamental to all healing for it recognizes that when we change our perception or our beliefs we send totally different messages to our cells and reprogram their expression."

So, what this now tells us is that since our social systems make up such a large part of our environment today, if we change these systems so they are "life-enhancing" instead of "death-defining" then those operating within the system will change the way they think and consequently their behavior.

Dr. Lipton also goes into the story as to how the human body is made up of some 70 trillion cells which make up the "community" of the human body. And how these cells chose this configuration as a way to survive using cooperation, for were it not for their decision as "information/intelligence" to do this, there would be no organism labeled "homo sapiens."

Dr. Lipton goes on to tell us how each cell includes all of the elements of the human body in miniature. And, from him we also learn that each cell is configured exactly like a computer chip. And then as we go through the other organs of the body and discover this system, we also find there are correlations between other body parts and a quantum computer.

So, this new information very much affects the way our social systems need to be configured to bring out the best in us. And, this new configuration can best be described as "organic," meaning in a natural formation. Or, should we say more like the way in which indigenous people see things as opposed to the way white people of European descent -- those who make up the "elite" as we call them, see things.

More on this later - i have written this in haste as i must go into town today.

Hi Bill, thanks for your "welcome" and cordial comments. I very much like what you have written and do not disagree with anything you write. The service that you perform appears to be much like the "think tank" portion of the www.futuredawning.org virtual learning center and think tank. And while i developed a format for the virtual learning center, i did not do the same for the think tank. So, i see us as being a very good fit together.

I also have gone back and forth as to whether or not i wanted to make the organization a 501(c)3 or not. So, what we are now doing is setting up Future Dawning Enterprises as a consulting business and will develop a separate web site for it. Then we may want to do the 501(c)3 for the virtual learning center and think tank portion of what we are doing since it is really set up like a virtual campus. I originally linked 14 websites together to form the campus and we called each site a "portal and pathway" seeing each one as a transformational pathway leading into a future configuration as we evolved our consciousness.

However, when NING began to make sounds of charging for the sites, this set up became unaffordable at this time, although we may take each P&P back to NING as we acquire enough individual and group members to make it happen. But, for the time being, i have relocated all of the P&Ps to the TransitionUS Social Network where we will take advantage of the "no fee" status. However, i have left the FutureDawning Admin/Resource Center site up on NING and will continue to pay the fees there since we have quite a few individuals and groups signed up on that site. Then once we have acquired enough members to allow us to do so, as indicated previously, i will begin to move the individual P&P's back to NING and and link the sites together again.

Let me give you and others a little background on who i am and what i am about here. For about 18 years, i studied with Dr. V. Vernon Woolf, Founder of the International Academy of Holodynamics. www.holodynamics.com Now please do not let Dr. Woolf's title of Family and Marriage Counselor fool you as he is probably the foremost transformation agent in the world today. Dr. Woolf became quite adept at transforming the collective conscious/unconscious of groups working first with drug addicts and alcoholics, then moving into disadvantaged youth groups, then into mental illness, and finally prison reform.

His extraordinary ability came to the attention of Barbara Marx Hubbard who introduced him to the Institute of Natural Science in Russia, where to make a long story short, he was asked to work with them in transforming the former U.S.S.R., taking that country from communism to perestroika. And, he did go to Russia and he did lead the transformation of that country over a 10-year period using Holodynamics as a process, and it ended the Cold War. This is the first time a country of this size has been transformed peacefully. For his accomplishments Dr. Woolf was awarded an academy in the Natural Institute of Science, the first time ever that such an award was made to someone not a citizen of that country. And Dr. Woolf now operates the academy here in the United States. More information can be found on this event in Dr. Woolf's book: "The Dance of Life: Transform Your World Now" where he has recorded both the founding of the process of Holodynamics and how he used it in Russia.

While i never participated with Dr. Woolf in Russia, i did learn a great deal from my association with him and in 1997, inspired by what he accomplished in Russia, I wrote a proposal entitled: "Hands Across the Border: Operation Lifesave" directed toward reducing migration from south to north from Mexico into the United States. Presented at the highest level of government in that country, it was very well received. However, then was not the time. But had it have been implemented, and the story as to why it wasn't is long and detailed, it would have made Mexico a model for sustainable living for the world, and could quite possibly have reduced the threat of global climate change by a very large magnitude.

So, after a number of years, i went back to the drawing board as i saw that doing transformation at the ground level in just one country was not the way to go about this. There really are no beginnings and no endings and the transformation must involve the world with all countries participating. And since the Internet had evolved considerably during the interim years, i began to see how we could "manage" the transformation from a website implementing what we call "Community Learning and Information Centers" at the ground level. And, i have a Power Point Presentation showing how this concept works, but i don't know how to get it posted to the list here.

Anyway, when you write: resilience thinking would suggest that rather than a mono-lithic movement, we need a interconnected web of groups and organizations that are loosley connected, to survive shocks of various kinds. It would also suggest that we need a wide diversity of thinking about what is needed to move fowards and have debate about various visions for the world," this is what the virtual learning center is set up to facilitate.

I don't believe we need to discuss this as much as we need to set aside spaces in small communities where hand's on learning can take place using the community as the classroom. And we need lot's of experimentation to find out what work's and what doesn't because we have never "been here and done that before." This is a whole new ball game, and one in which we dare not make the kind of large scale mistakes such as has been done with genetically modified foods. In his book, "The Food Revolution," John Robbins writes as to how the scientists involved in this experiment came within a hair's breadth of letting loose a GMO that could have destroyed the world, had they not caught it before it was released into the marketplace.

So, the Virtual Learning Center coupled with the Community Learning and Information Centers form the kind of "interconnected web of groups and organizations that are loosley connected, to survive shocks of various kinds" that you express a need for.

And the best thing about this is that we can have 200 or 500 or 1 million or more communities around the world spontaneously and unanimously moving into sustainable living configurations and linked together via the Internet in an information exchange to ensure that individuals and groups are not out there re-inventing the wheel for lack of information as the Community Learning/Wellness and Information Centers are the first step toward what will be a "sustainable, re-localized, living community." The CL(w)ICs are the spaces within communities where hand's on learning will take place. And each community will be different since there are no two localities that are exactly the same, nor will the people who will reside within them be the same.

We visualize the network that will link these communities together via the net called: "Habitats in Harmony." The basis for the transformation that Vern Woolf accomplished in Russia was one built on the creation of sustainable living communities networked together.

As far as monetary reform goes, we are working closely with two people: Thomas H. Greco, author of "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization." The other person has just recently written a book to which Barbara Marx Hubbard is writing the forward. This, as yet unpublished book supports the theory that money is not a necessity in our civilization and is instead a detriment to its full potential. But, we have not as yet developed a Portal and Pathway to house this discussion and learning group; however, all we need to do is to find a name for it and put up another website that we then link with the other P&Ps.

I want to discuss more about the philosophy of Future Dawning and where it came from, however i will add another comment for this purpose.